Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

214. THE HUMAN INVENTON OF DEATH:

‘Since you are mortal don’t prophesy the quality of tomorrow’s dawn / and when you meet the man of the year / don’t try to read his life line / for swifter than a dragonfly / pfft / a change’ – that was written by Simonides about 2500 years ago as a Greek victory ode and in it he basically restates what Solon (the Athenian legislator) once said : ‘call no man happy before his death’ I was thinking about that as we started talking then too of ‘people’ we’ve known and Reggie Crispin says that he ‘once knew a scholar in Royal Hiltingshire 1st School who was perfectly versed in as ‘aspects’ of death (how we’d gotten to that point of conversation I cannot rightly recall) and he related : “until about 1950 – when someone died in the Newfoundland fishing village of Witless Bay the community took steps to avoid angering his irascible spirit and to do so they stopped the clock at the moment of death so the dead person would believe he was still alive and they covered the mirrors because it was dangerous for the spirit to see its reflection and since the deceased was assumed to be ‘furious’ about his death the best defensive strategy was to be seen acting as if he was still the life of the party - which meant raucous wakes where the corpse could be danced with given glasses of rum and made (via strings) to sit up in his coffin and Witless Bay had another custom also designed to confuse any returning spirit and that was that the chairs in the room where the deadman’s wake had been were overturned and the door locked for a day after the funeral – but when one Father Glough arrived in Witless Bay he forbade these practices (in the light of this Christian teachings) so that from the 1930’s to the late 40’s the practice had just about dwindled and regular Christian attitudes of death had taken over” and of course that became but the beginning of a long wharfside discussion of the entire concept (‘Death and everything else’ I called it) and we mentioned other practices like cannibalism and the sacrifice of mates and servants concubines and horses all which had been put to use to accelerate or ease the soul into that ‘afterlife’ adventure (one Timothy Taylor had called the soul – he said – “something that was ‘us’ and something which ‘continued’ after death”) and we’d decided that there had probably always been a widespread fear lodged within humankind – a fear of the ‘disembodied’ soul - and then Reggie said that he’d learned that “actually cannibalism was one of man’s first methods of disposing of the dead – at once an expression of thrift and a form of conspicuous consumption as well as a ‘way’ to incorporate the dead into the living” and the he said it had been found as a practice as far back as ‘Homo Habilis’ – an early mankind of long long ago and “likewise against the prevailing opinion that the earliest burials about 12,000 years ago demonstrate reverence and affection they were actually a way of ostracizing scapegoats as in ‘no one wanted to ingest you’ and only with the first farmers in the Neolithic era did burial become standard practice” and having myself just come down from the heights above us with the old St. Peter’s graves of all the Mundys and Parkers I could stand I was ready just then for some further ‘edification’ so I turned it back on him and said “well may that be but do you not think that is was the ‘practice’ first instituted by humans of grieving and the anguish of loss which eventually coalesced into the proto-religious cults of death and dying whereby great tomes and magnificent kingdoms were then imagined and erected as for the places where these ‘dead’ go and had not any of this been done - had not Mankind taken Death from out of the realm of simple animal passage and decay - it would never have arisen as such a major ‘obstacle’ to every individual human who now must LIVE with the thought and affect of DYING?” and he said “what are you saying?” to which I replied “simply that – if we look at it clearly – Humans INVENTED death – first as a concept and then as a practice for it marks by one singular different step the variety between us now and the animal kingdom now - of which we are both a part and vastly separate from - for we have been somehow allowed to dwell upon and erect a structural concept of DEATH and DYING as a place/kingdom/passage/act/practice and it is thereby something now which rules and infractures our very fabric but had we not invented it – by whatever means – our ‘passage’ would have been seen – without religion and without a God – as a simple move into the next evolved form of living a simple ‘passage’ from one room to the other with no need of all that which DEATH conceptually brings with it and that PRIDE and that hubris is what both elevates and limits us amidst all the rest of the world’s living beings” as we spoke - of course - before us the little meanderings of the boat traffic and odd tanker and tug freight was rolling by with the resultant wake and ripple of noise and the slap of the water on the old pilings and although it did nothing to compete with our own personal back-and-forth voices it did lend a nice background sound to what we were saying (as if irreverent sea-creatures had suddenly a’lit to land in order to speak) and then he said “have you given thought to how less comfortable life would have been without a ‘storyline’ for it to end by?” and I said “whatever that means I’ll not know for the only ‘storyline’ as you put it is the obvious one to me of intuitive and inspirational feel - the sort of thing which simply guides a life through all its undertakings and if that’s the ‘comfort’ for the story as it is needed then that’s OK too but too much has always been invested in the hierarchy and ritual aspects that go with organized approved and dictated learning and supposed truth - and just look how many people in all reality have been slaughtered and decimated by people over the millennia fighting for their own stupid version of a very liquid truth” and by that of course I’d meant to say that any unfettered acceptance of church kingship political power and ritualized allegiance to anything would never be a part of my own make-up but I’d missed evidently the opportunity to get that across to him “you can’t really say that” he replied “for so many layers of social cooperation and living and all the advancement that went with it were motivated and advanced by those very same ‘powers’ who put some structure and allegiance into ‘society’ – blindly forming without even fully being cognizant of it – the world we live amongst right now” and I said “no no I’d much rather say the RUINS of the world we live amongst right now - and I mean that sincerely the RUINS of every form of rational logic aggressive demand and mercantile impetus towards making nothing but a prison for fellow mankind wherever” and he simply looked at me and said “way over the top old chap ! way over the top!”
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It was never really easy for me to forget that conversation – and I replayed any number of times in my mind – as eventually the two of us just sauntered over to the nearby Armory outdoor bar and drank a Porter together – ale being some sort of effusive weakness of the British Isles too I suppose and as for me not caring less it was the first beer I’d had in quite some time and I realized I didn’t miss it one bit but anyway we parted on good company - both ALIVE and well thank you - and there’s a bloke I’ll surely never see again yet his words and mind forever shall grapple in space.
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I am sometimes convinced that NOTHING exists and I can confirm that to myself – which in turn only reasserts my premise and I see instead the huge parade of mental constructs and stopping off points along the way and underway by everyone in a curious one-and-the-same-time confluence of assumption and interaction and everyone who finds dynamics is in the midst of change and alteration while so many others just rule along safely and soundly and right here as I watch I can feel and realize the waterfront which has – in essence- grown THROUGH me and which answers to many of the assumed parameters of my own thinking but yet which can be read completely and entirely differently by anyone so inclined – even sitting next to me – amidst their own working set of assumptions and occurrences – and read wrongly or rightly it does not matter for those concepts (only with great difficulty if so) cannot be transferred or read one to the other and it’s a might-solace of letters like some Tower of Babel symbolically placed in lines of reality so fevered and dense that they cause tendencies and deaths and births and arisings and all life is underway at all times with growth and action as much as decay and falsification and destruction is a solid wall of change and not much else as we allow spiritual change to undertake removal in our name and LOGOS word made flesh ruler of all things is the creative concept of force driving forward and past and into everything else which may be.